School of Medicine
Showing 1-22 of 22 Results
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Cellas Ari'ka Hayes
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioDr. Cellas Hayes is a first-generation college graduate, neuroscientist, and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology and minors in Classics, and Latin from the University of Mississippi (2019) and earned his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences with an emphasis in Pharmacology (2022), where he received advanced neuroscience research training under Dr. Nicole Ashpole’s guidance.
At Stanford, Dr. Hayes employs cutting-edge epidemiological and biostatistical methods with high-dimensional biological data to investigate the impact of cerebrovascular and Alzheimer’s disease pathologies on age-related outcomes such as cognitive decline and dementia. He has established national collaborations including the Strong Heart Study, Cardiovascular Health Study, Health and Aging Brain Study - Health Disparities, and the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center.
Dr. Hayes is becoming a recognized leader in his field and beyond, serving as a Stanford Propel Postdoctoral Fellowship Alumni, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund PDEP Fellow, and a HABS-HD Health Enhancement Scientific Program Fellow, and diversity supplement recipient. He is the founder and chair of the National Black Postdocs Emergency Support Program and a former co-president of the Stanford Black Postdocs Association. As a postdoc, Dr. Hayes has accrued over 500K in fellowship funds while participating in notable professional development programs like the NIH NIMHD HDRI and NIA Butler Williams Scholars Program. At UM, Dr. Hayes was the first recipient to receive a NIH NRSA F31 in 37 years while also being a Southern Regional Education Board Scholar and UMMC-GTEC Smith Scholars Program.
Passionate about mentorship and education, Dr. Hayes develops innovative resources and curricula through the Stanford Grant Writing Academy, where he has trained postbaccalaureate, doctoral, and postdoctoral scholars in grant writing and career development. -
Chris Heitzig
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioChris Heitzig is a New Map of Life Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. An economist by training, his research develops models to examine healthy aging across the life course, with a particular emphasis on identifying causal pathways and key points of policy intervention to improve well-being in later life. A central focus of his work is the socioeconomic impact of undiagnosed metabolic disorders—how these conditions manifest, the costs of leaving them untreated, and the potential for interventions to improve detection and outcomes. His research combines insights from economics and public health with machine learning methods for causal inference.
Before joining Stanford, Chris served in research roles at the Brookings Institution and the World Bank. At Brookings, he managed a $1.5 million research grant investigating how technological change is reshaping employment in Africa. At the World Bank, he designed randomized controlled trials to measure the causal effects of health and employment programs and served in an operational role as the day-to-day lead for a $20 million job transition program. Chris holds a PhD in Economics from the Institute of Development Studies, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Saint John’s University. -
Ixel Hernandez-Castro
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioEnvironmental epidemiologist focused on understanding how cumulative environmental exposures during pregnancy and early life shape maternal and child health across the life course. My work integrates epidemiologic methods and molecular biomarkers to uncover shared biological pathways linking chemical and social exposures to cardiometabolic and neurodevelopmental outcomes, with the goal of informing early prevention strategies and supporting health.
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Alyssa Michelle Howren
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioAlyssa Howren is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Department of Epidemiology and Population Health in the School of Medicine. She completed her MSc and PhD training at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences during which she was a trainee at Arthritis Research Canada. Her PhD training was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Award, along with UBC’s Wayne Riggs Interdisciplinary Scholarship in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Andrew Nord Fellowship in Rheumatology. Her research focuses on using multiple data sources to provide evidence to disentangle the complex relationship between depression and anxiety with inflammatory arthritis and assess how people living with inflammatory arthritis are treated for their comorbid mental disorders. Methodological approaches in Dr. Howren’s work have included systematic reviews, qualitative research, mixed methods, and population-based studies using linked administrative health databases. She was awarded a CIHR Fellowship for her postdoctoral research at Stanford University which aims to evaluate whether biases in clinical decision-making contribute to the sex and gender differences observed in the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.
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Amy M Inkster
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioAmy Inkster, PhD is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University. She conducts research on epigenetic alterations in pregnancy and early life to understand the molecular levers affecting healthy development. She primarily uses large 'omics datasets to study the effect of environmental exposures on pregnancy outcomes and maternal health.
Dr. Inkster received her PhD in Medical Genetics from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), where her research focused on evaluating DNA methylation variation in prenatal life, primarily in the context of placental epigenetics, sex differences, prenatal exposures, and X-chromosome inactivation. She holds a BSc in Chemistry. As a cross-disciplinary researcher, her work and research interests lie at the intersection of molecular mechanisms and their impacts on human health and disease at the population level. -
Dayoon Kwon
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioI am an environmental epidemiologist leveraging multi-omics to study how environmental exposures influence human health across the life course. At Stanford, I develop epigenetic biomarkers and aging clocks to capture the impact of early-life exposures. During my PhD at UCLA, I investigated air pollution and Parkinson’s disease, focusing on gene–environment interactions and metabolomics. Previously at Columbia, I quantified biological aging using blood-based biomarkers.
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Tracy Lam-Hine
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioTracy Lam-Hine (he/him), DrPH, MBA, is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and the Center for Population Health Sciences, a Research Education Component Fellow at the Stanford Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, and is affiliated via a Research Fellowship with the Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research. Dr. Lam-Hine is a social epidemiologist and population health scientist, studying how exposure to adverse childhood experiences, policy environments, and mid-life chronic disease burden shape the risk cognitive and functional aging in later life. Within this broad research area, he has a special focus on the health and social experiences of the US Multiracial population, surveillance data, methods to improve descriptive and population-generalizable research.
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Zongbo Li
Postdoctoral Scholar, Health Policy
BioZongbo Li, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford Health Policy. His research focuses on applying simulation modeling and cost-effectiveness analysis to inform policy decisions related to substance use and infectious diseases. He evaluates overdose prevention interventions, including naloxone distribution and medications for opioid use disorder, with particular attention to vulnerable populations such as people who are incarcerated. His work also encompasses modeling infectious diseases and evaluating interventions for COVID-19, HIV, and HCV. Zongbo earned his PhD in Health Services Research, Policy & Administration from the University of Minnesota.
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Lili Liu
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioLili (Larry) Liu, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University. Dr. Liu is an integrative epidemiologist whose research is unified by a consistent methodological approach rather than a single disease area. Across his master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral training, he has repeatedly developed or operationalized epidemiologic frameworks and analytic programs and applied them to important public health questions spanning rare diseases, chronic disease, cancer, mortality, microbiome, and women’s health. His work brings together molecular biomarkers, large-scale population cohorts, and real-world health data to generate coherent, hypothesis-driven research on how genetic variation, lifestyle, pharmacologic factors, and early-life exposures shape inflammation, biological aging, and chronic disease risk across the life course.
During his master’s training at Peking University, Dr. Liu developed expertise in literature synthesis, national claims-based study, rare disease burden estimation, patient-centered health information research, cohort-based analysis, and vaccine effectiveness evaluation. He helped build and apply claims-based analytic algorithms to estimate incidence and prevalence for multiple rare diseases in China, led first-author studies on online health information and patient information needs in rare disease populations, and established an analytic framework for CHARLS-based cohort studies that supported multiple downstream projects. During his PhD training at Vanderbilt University, he expanded into population genetics, molecular and cancer epidemiology, mortality and health disparities research, gut microbiome, and pooled multi-study analyses. His doctoral work included a multi-ancestry GWAS of urinary prostaglandin E2 metabolite (PGE-M), development of PGE-M-derived dietary and lifestyle scores, and Mendelian randomization analyses linking lipid-related pathways to colorectal cancer risk. He also led several first-author studies in the Southern Community Cohort Study on poverty, sitting time, physical activity, walking and mortality, and alcohol intake and the gut microbiome, several of which received substantial public health and media attention.
At Stanford, Dr. Liu has developed an independent research program centered on women’s health and life-course epidemiology using U.S. national claims data. He has built large nationwide pregnancy and mother-baby cohorts from MarketScan to study adverse obstetric outcomes, long-term cardiometabolic and hepatic outcomes, and early-onset cancer risk. His first corresponding-author paper at Stanford examined gestational diabetes in relation to subsequent type 2 diabetes and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, and his ongoing work extends this framework to cardiovascular, kidney, metabolic, and reproductive health outcomes, including PCOS and endometriosis. He also received a Stanford MCHRI fellowship grant to study prenatal and early-life antibiotic exposure in relation to pediatric inflammatory bowel disease and celiac disease. In parallel, his collaborative work includes placental and maternal-fetal research on extracellular vesicles and angiogenic signaling.
Methodologically, Dr. Liu works at the interface of causal inference, pharmacoepidemiology, molecular epidemiology, and scalable real-world data science, using reproducible analytic pipelines in R, Python, SQL, and high-performance computing environments. Across all stages of his training, the central theme of his work has been to build scalable analytic infrastructure and apply it to high-impact epidemiologic questions with broad public health relevance, with the overarching goal of translating rigorous population science into actionable strategies for chronic disease prevention in diverse populations. -
Javier Perez-Garcia
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioJavier Perez-Garcia is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University. His research has been focused on the integration of multi-omic data (e.g., genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and microbiome) to identify potential biomarkers of treatment response for complex diseases like asthma. His research background includes experience both in molecular biology techniques (e.g., DNA extraction and sequencing libraries preparation) and bioinformatic analyses (e.g., processing of raw omic data, association studies at genomic scale, or multi-omic integration through machine learning and quantitative trait loci analyses). He holds a Ph.D. in Health Sciences and a B.Sc. in Pharmacy from the University of La Laguna (Spain).
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Ziping Ye
Postdoctoral Scholar, Health Policy
BioZiping Ye is a postdoctoral researcher at the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford. Her research focuses on the development of decision making models for disease prevention programs.
Previously, Dr Ye served as an assistant professor at the School of Public Administration at Hainan University, where she conducted research on cost-effectiveness thresholds, health outcomes studies, and health burden surveys. Dr Ye received her Ph.D. in Pharmacy Administration from Shenyang Pharmaceutical University with a specialization in Pharmacoeconomics. She is also a self-taught R programmer. -
Astrid Nicole Zamora
Postdoctoral Scholar, Epidemiology
BioDr. Zamora's work examines how social and environmental contexts shape the three pillars of health, diet, sleep, and physical activity, and influence chronic disease risk. Her research integrates epidemiologic methods with community-based participatory approaches to translate findings into evidence-based public health strategies. Her goal is to advance chronic disease prevention and promote heart-healthy aging among Latino/a communities and underserved populations.
